Does Teaching Experience Improve Student Grades?

The author has been teaching physics for almost fifty years and has tried just about everything suggested to improve one's teaching ability and to increase student learning. Some of these teaching methods were clearly are more productive than others, but has the use of such methods significantly improved the grades of the students taking his classes during this extended period of time? This paper attempts to answer this question by providing data that illustrates how his calculus-based physics grades have changed over the years and discusses some possible reasons for such changes. In all probability, any conclusions derived from this calculus-based physics course would be applicable to most other physics courses taught by most other professors during their teaching careers.